Former President Bill Clinton’s nearly 50-minute speech Wednesday night at the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte was praised by panelists and reporters on all three major cable-news networks.

“I’ve been watching this former president of the United States going back to 1992 when I was CNN’s White House correspondent, and I have to tell you, this may be the best speech I have ever heard Bill Clinton deliver over all of these years, and I listened to so many of his speeches during his eight years as president,” CNN’s Wolf Blitzer said.

“Affable. Effective. As a Democrat it doesn’t get any better,” MSNBC’s Ed Schultz said. “I’m sitting here and I’m giddy. This is exactly what [President] Barack Obama needed.”

GOP political adviser Steve Schmidt said Clinton’s political prowess is unmatched on either side of the isle.

“I wish to God as a Republican we had someone on our side who had the ability to do that,” Schmidt said on MSNBC. “We don’t. It would be great if we did.”

Fox News’ Brit Hume raved, “I’ve always said if I were ever in trouble and if I were guilty, especially if I were guilty, I would want Bill Clinton there to defend me. Nobody does it better. He’s the most talented politician I ever covered and the most charming man I’ve ever met. And no one in my view can mount an argument more effectively than he can.”

Then Hume tempered his praise.

“That doesn’t mean everything he said was true,” he said, later adding, “It was a little self-indulgent, and it was about 30 percent too long.”

GOP commentator Alex Castellanos said on CNN that Clinton’s speech may have sealed Obama’s reelection.

“Lock the doors, you don’t have to come back tomorrow. This convention is done. This will be the moment that probably reelected Barack Obama,” he said. “Bill Clinton saved the Democratic Party once. It was going too far left, he came in as the new Democrat and took it to the center. He did it again tonight.”

When Anderson Cooper asked about the quote later, Castellanos said: “If Barack Obama is reelected, I think tonight will be one of the big reasons why,” he said. “If a Republican convention is a hall full of crazy right-winging lunatics, this is a hall full of crazy left-wing lunatics and Bill Clinton just gave them all a master class of how to move back to the middle and win an election.”

Castellanos said it comes at a classic Clinton price: “It comes at a cost, and the cost is this — this party does not belong to Barack Obama now. Daddy bear is home. He came home tonight and said, give the kid another chance, the next four years will be better.”

MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell said the speech’s length might prove a problem, noting that it went a half-hour longer than scheduled, saying it “was one of those Clinton tests of a television audience’s attention span.”

But its length, O’Donnell said, was part of its “magic.”

“When you were reading along the prompter and you saw what he did to it, that was where the magic of the speech was,” he said. “That’s how he improved that speech beyond what was written for him.”

Not everyone was so enamored with Clinton, though.

Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer slammed the address, dubbing it “a campaign speech for a third Clinton term” and a “giant swing and a miss.”

“Look, it had all the classic Clinton elements: It was engaging, it was humorous. In some cases it was generous — I think there are more mentions of the Bushes than I heard in the three days in Tampa,” Krauthammer said. “On the other hand, it was also vintage Clinton in that it was sprawling, undisciplined and truly self-indulgent. This is one of the strangest nomination speeches, I think, ever given.”